[FrontPage] The coronavirus, like so many other social ills, real and metaphorical, incubated in major cities.New York City, with the highest population density in the country, also accounted for the highest death toll. San Francisco, the second highest among large cities, was a major incubator.
Pandemic maps of the death toll show the deaths concentrating around major cities before making the slow trek from urban into suburban and eventually rural areas. The urban lockdowns didn’t stop the spread of the virus. What they really did was trap poor and middle class residents in urban areas, while the wealthy fled, and the virus spread to urbanites with the least mobility.
The people with the worst immune systems, in the densest living conditions, and the least ability to get up and leave, suffered the most, from nursing home patients to minorities with large families. The general pattern was historically familiar from the Middle Ages, and the only thing that our public health experts proved is that they weren’t any smarter than medieval peasants.
But the coronavirus is an urban problem and all the official solutions to it are urban solutions. And the urban problems and their solutions are killing us and taking down the whole country.
The Black Lives Matter race riots that followed on the heels of the lockdowns were yet another example of an urban problem exploding out of failed cities to become a national crisis. But the vast majority of our problems, social, economic, racial, and political, are the problem of the city.